By John MacDougall

I'm not 'burning out' because I'm not on fire

Step Eleven is about our relationship with God. The most important thing we can do in Step Eleven is not a certain type of prayer or meditation, it is remembering which one of us is God and which one of us is a human. Most of us will get the answer right if we are asked, but often we behave as if we were God. That's how burnout enters our lives.

If we answer the call to serve others, and if we take employment in the service of others, we can mistake the urgency of people's needs as a guide to how "on fire" we should be to help.

Step Eleven asks us to pray and meditate to have conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for our lives and the power to carry that out. It does not mention praying for power to carry out our will. When we decide what is right, and we work very hard to make it happen, we burn out from the effort, especially when our work doesn't have real results.

Instead of trying to force results, Step Eleven has suggestions. It suggests that we "carry the vision of God's will into all of our activities." To do that, we are asked to pray at the beginning of the day that our motives "be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives." Then, as we face uncertainty in our day, we are asked to "ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision." The "Big Book" says we should relax and don't struggle. With practice, this becomes a working part of the mind. When we encounter problems, instead of pushing until they give way, we let go and look to our Higher Power for inspiration. We pray that we be shown all day what the next step is to be. Many recovering people call this "the knowledge of the next right thing to do." We don't have to figure out the whole story, just the next right thing for us to do.

If the vision we carry all day is the vision of our will, of how we want people to behave and how we want everything to be, then we will end up tired and "burnt out," because most people don't really want to fulfill our vision for their lives.

If the vision we carry all day is the vision of God's will, then we don't have to struggle to make it happen, because God is in charge, not us. We are free to see how we can live up to God's vision for us, rather than resorting to the basest tactics of those whom we would control. The "Big Book" says, "We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves."

I remember the first time the Narcotics Anonymous group had a dance in a church I served as pastor. The church gave permission, thinking of a sedate dance from decades ago. An 85-year-old church trustee was passing by during the dance and encountered loud music, smoke and laser machines, crowds and noise. We had no residential neighbors, so it was very loud. He was angry, bordering on apoplectic. He stormed into the church and demanded, "Who's in charge here!" The disc jockey responded, cheerfully, "Oh, God's in charge, but I can try to help you!"

We cheerfully rejoice that God is in charge, and we are just here to help.

John A. MacDougall, DMin, is the director of Spiritual Guidance at Hazelden in Center City, Minn. He may be contacted at jmacdougall@hazelden.org.

Published Summer 2008, The Voice